


gin, in reverse

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Reverse Chronology, Strange stylistic prose choices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-23 01:21:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10709166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: You’ve seen him before with his own blood in his mouth. And in sleep, exposed veins and neck, and in a venezuelan prison, just that once. You were there to peel off bills, the anticipatory hum of banked amusement you knew would fill the space when the adrenaline faded.Or — no, that was you, on the other side of the gate, and Arthur was there to bail you out and there was no amusement. You’re rewriting the past with the knowledge of the future, like you’ve always had him.(A Gin remix.)





	gin, in reverse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [swtalmnd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swtalmnd/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Gin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8174846) by [swtalmnd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swtalmnd/pseuds/swtalmnd). 



> For Swtalmnd. I hope you enjoy this take on your Gin fic. I've been so anxious about it. Enjoy your story in reverse.

There are cherries he likes, and you keep them in the pantry. 

*

You’ve seen him before with his own blood in his mouth. And in sleep, exposed veins and neck, and in a venezuelan prison, just that once. You were there to peel off bills, the anticipatory hum of banked amusement you knew would fill the space when the adrenaline faded. 

Or — no, that was you, on the other side of the gate, and Arthur was there to bail  _ you  _ out and there was no amusement. You’re rewriting the past with the knowledge of the future, like you’ve always had him.

Now, though.

Not that there was anything romantic about colonialism, but you’ve stretched out on his bed and called it yours. You have set up camp in his home and you’ve rewritten some of the fiction about you, a passport with the same homeland for the both of you, a corner coffee shop that recognizes a collective unit.

You painted his study a shade of blue that makes you think of him, tangled in his name like synesthesia. His wet bar is full of the alcohol you like and the alcohol he likes and you’re doubled up on the common ground.  

Ownership, you think, is a funny thing. There is a car in the driveway that belongs to Arthur, glossy and well cared for. Aging gracefully under his practiced hand. It is a funny thing to belong to him, relentlessly maintained, obsessively cared for. 

He might have the same stewardship over you — you aren’t quite sure but you are getting used to the keenness of his gaze, the friction of his affection, and the way that his attention rests on you like a lingering searchlight. 

Your man does nothing by halves — neck and exposed wrists and the name on his birth certificate, and you, the scoundrel who’s seen them all. 

*

Your body fits with his body like this:

When you are both wearing clothes, you press your mouth to his and there is a pull like the tide, drawing out before the wave crashes down. 

His hand cups the collar of your shirt and you think, incongruously, of the way he holds his PASIV, sure enough of its sturdiness but careful just in case. His mouth slides across yours, smears down the side of your neck, dragging against your pulse but never hard enough to leave a mark.

There is intimate heat, stunning until you try to string the words together, and come up inarticulate. How can you say that his thigh would slide between yours and you would fall right off the face of the earth if he did not have you pinned, at the hip and wrist and heart? 

You can’t, but you hope he knows, anyway. He’s a researcher by trade and he tends to know things without your help. 

Time tilts on its side. Looking at him, you remember that you did the impossible together once, all of that pride and excitement and longing gets tangled. He says,  _ inside me,  _ and your heart slams against the fence of your bones as you rush to give him what he’s asked for, wetting a finger and then a second and third for a patient exploration of the secret parts of him you’ve been invited to touch. There is clean sweat and his breathing goes wonky and you are trying to set every detail into your memory, in case the stars never align this way again. 

_ Yes,  _ you say, helpless, mouth drying. Your teeth fit around his collarbone, and the muscled length of his thigh sits in the flat of your hand like it belongs there. You’ve turned into some sort of harlequin novel, existing in the spaces between his breaths. It’s humiliating/exhilarating in equal measure to be so consumed. 

His body is like this: the answer to some aching question you’ve been asking. 

(Not forever, but maybe since you’ve settled into your bones, since you decided you’d crossed so many things off the list, and that you could have the obvious thing, the settled thing you’d hoped for.)

Afterwards, you both sprawl across his bed and you drape a hand across his resting stomach, feeling sickeningly happy, a lingering, well-used feeling suffused in your limbs. You watch him on your side until his eyes close and don’t open again, and then drift off yourself. 

You’ve been in mind crime so long that sleep with someone else doesn’t come easy, but you curl up in his bed and drift off with the swell and fall of his breathing beneath your palm, sofe and sweet as a lullaby. 

*

The grocery lists, at the top of the list-of-lists you never expected, delightful all the same. He makes one for your impending shopping trip, and it lets you measure how long he plans on keeping you around, and you see a vision of unspooling days. 

You talk about the you and the him that existed years ago, the first time you looked at him, coy, and he turned his head away from your gaze. You were on a job and he didn’t think you were serious enough, winced at the way you pretended not to give a fuck, how you never let him catch you doing your own research. 

If you had played your hard differently, could he have loved you then? Could you have loved him when you were both in Italy? Perhaps in the adrenaline rush of your getaway, or in the silent two weeks where you laid low before attempting a second grab at the mark, or maybe even in the flush of victory. 

You picture it and it is easy to give your past self your current hope, rewriting history again. When you feel brave enough to look behind the curtain you can see it with stunning clarity:

You, getting him into bed easily enough with a sly look and a second-day stubble, playing up your accent and the shape you were in at thirty-three, a dirty weekend in one of the cities he likes, reading him like a mark to hit every note pitch-perfect, fucking him in luxurious and impractical hotel showers with more  than one head, sucking him off with the fervor of a new convert, kissing him in not-quite-private hot tubs — 

— getting agitated with the constancy of his body, growing bored of routine and the inability to sleep with attractive strangers you met in bars. You at thirty three would not have known how to treat him. 

You feel snide addressing your past self with superiority, like you’ve cracked yourself open like a Russian nesting doll to insult your own inner-layer. But you do, fleetingly,  _ You wouldn’t have known what to do with him,  _ you assure yourself, thirty three and cocksure. 

You don’t know for sure that you’ll do the right thing now, but you have the tools for it, and you;re beginning to suspect that you’re both going to get it right. 

*

American diners ply you with the kind of grease that feels familiar, like breakfast overseas, but not quite. There is something liminal about all-night tables, a pot of coffee between you that you’re wincing your way through. 

The lighting is terrible and someone even with a hangover you find him stunning against the backdrop of Americana. He hasn’t fought his hair into submission and his clothes are rumpled in a way that you feel privileged to see. He and he is telling you a story. The salt shaker is him and the ketchup poured into a generic squeeze bottle is a man in a car that is faster than his, not now but then, the ketchup catches the salt shaker. 

He is telling you this — why is he telling you this — oh, because he is thinking about his car. his car that he’s got someone looking at right now because he expects to be in town a while and you both killing time. 

Your mind keeps wandering off — not away from him but towards some luminous future version of him, like the past version of him where you woke up with him huddled on the same soft sheets, like yesterday but without the hang-over horror. There is a mirror into the future that unfolds at angles, intersecting mirrors and you can see that in every future angle he wakes up less spooked until he’s belonged to you a hundred years. 

_ Belonged to you a hundred years. _ You think it again, savoring it. So your mind is wandering but towards him into some world that doesn’t exist yet except that you’re willing it to, and isn’t that some warped echo of what Ghandi said — give me a man and a bottle of gin… 

The sun is out and his name is in your mouth like the contents of a cement mixer, you’ve been turning it over so long because if you ever let it rest, it will set and live there forever. 

You’ve always been so careful, but you’re on the brink, now. 

The heat from your mug seeps in until it feels like it might be permanent, just the temperature your hands will always be, on the far side of comfortable. It is easy to think, looking at Arthur’s earnest face, that your fingers will never be cold again.

A man can only be so careful for so long. 

*

He wakes up, before that, in your arms. He spooks, but then untenses. 

You see it, deliberate. He’s assessing the did-we and of course the answer is we-did-not because last night he’d been a sloppy drunk and you hadn’t left yourself at home, hadn’t forgotten that your whole self at home. 

You took him home and he invited you into his bed, so long as you kept your hands mostly to yourself, and you followed his lead. 

You’re wearing  _ pajamas _ , for fuck’s sake. 

*

Your man is drinking at the bar. Your man is drinking at the bar and you haven’t been invited to sit near/with/around him but you place your body on an adjacent stool like you think he might not notice — player two has entered the game.

Your hands are soft, supple. His face is equally soft, sanded, because he grooms on both ends of the day. Your palm on his face would feel like a fitted pair, but you haven’t been invited. You wrap your hungry hands around a glass instead, dip it into the well of call-liquor that wasn’t bottomless until you started invading stranger’s minds for a minted coin.

You’re not so far removed from that anxious child who counted and recounted bills and ran out on the tab more than once, when a beautiful girl, a beautiful boy sat sloped and unhappy and you wanted for a minute to warm them up.

Your man, he doesn’t look unhappy, but you see the potential to arc away from the middle ground in front of you: you could be gilded, he could be glittering, stolen kisses in a borrowed city and then you could pull the pin between your teeth on the way out, adrenaline high and heart between your teeth. You’ve always got a passport to burn.

Your man puts a cherry between his teeth, and you write the name of them into a sacred part of you, where you keep all the things you expect to need.

*

Your man climbs up to the bar. He doesn’t know he is your man, or rather, he isn’t, yet.

The barman looks at him, wants to know, “waiting for someone?”

Your man is in the same suit he wore at the tail end of the job, waistcoat untucked and then soon draped over the back of his chair. He is exhausted, ready for a change of pace, to cut himself loose from the tangled tension of prolonged job-based paranoia. The hotel bar has the best gin selection in town and he doesn’t have to worry about dancing with the one who brought him if he hails his own cab.

All of this to say, he shakes his head no. 


End file.
